In the same article I referenced in my last post, I wrote that Romney is signing on supporters who mean little to the average voter but send strong signals to inside-the-beltway movement conservatives. Today we get another of those names: Cesar Conda.

Conda's support of Romney should not be a total shock to observant locals: Conda is currently with Mike Murphy's political consulting firm, DC Navigators, which has received more than $200,000 from Romney's gubernatorial campaign committee over the past 18 months or so.

As I wrote in last week's issue, Mitt Romney keeps getting closer and closer to being the last viable conservative standing for the anti-McCain right wing to rally around for the GOP Presidential nomination. Today, he moved one step ahead; The Wall Street Journal's Washinton Whispers reports that Senator Bill Frist won't run

Brian Camenker's MassResistance group -- a same-sex wedding, of sorts, of the Article 8 Alliance and Parents' Rights Coalition -- has released a scathing attack on Mitt Romney, meant to warn national conservatives not to be fooled by the Mittster. The document, citing such reliable sources as the Boston Phoenix, catalogues Romney's moderate statements and actions on everything from gay rights to.

Mark the date, Mitt: August 11, 2007. That's when the Iowa Republican Party will hold its traditional Ames straw poll, according to yesterday's Des Moines Register. The poll is one of the big early media-grabbing opportunities for Presidential candidates.

The Ames fundraising event has long since become thoroughly unrepresentative of actual Iowa caucus voters -- campaigns bus people in from far and wide just to vote in the poll -- so now it gets hailed as importance evidence of the candidates' level of campaign organization.

So, apparently Mitt Romney had been unaware that cutting funds from the program that provides winter shelter to the homeless would result in fewer homeless people getting shelter during the winter. All it took was someone pointing it out, and he quickly rectified the situation. Not his fault -- "some idiotic state bureaucrat couldn't see the people through the numbers," says Brian McGrory.

Democrats gained control of both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature in this month's election. This weekend, house Democrats picked Terie Norelli of Plymouth to be the next speaker. Over in the senate, they've already picked Concord's Sylvia Larsen as president.

Nationwide, only nine women have ever served as state senate president, three of them doing so now, and 20 have been state house speaker, including just two currently, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers.

According to the AP story about Mitt Romney's Big Dig press conference this morning, the built-in fire-detection system doesn't work properly, so "tunnel operators are spotting fires by
relying on cell phone calls from motorists, or by noticing a reduction in their
speed of travel."

Seriously, the first they'd know about a car engulfed in flames within a tunnel would be the traffic backing up? Yeah, I don't feel so great about that.

As Deval Patrick puts together his team to run the state government, the Talking Politics blog will grade his appointments. We'll be keeping a close eye out for hackery, patronage, and incompetence, and whether Patrick seems to be fulfilling his promise to bring fresh, new perspectives to Beacon Hill.

The Hartford Courant is reporting that Democrat Joe Courtney has won the official recount over incumbent Republican Congressman Rob Simmons, by 91 votes, in Connecticut's 2nd district. This means that Christopher Shays, who won re-election with a whopping 50.9% of the vote in the Connecticut 4th -- the region way, way, down in the southwest tip of the state -- will be New England's only Republican member of the US House of Representatives in the coming session.

Let's see how many ways new RNC chairman, Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida, is connected to the scandals, embarassments, and unpopular policies that helped lead to the party's recent defeat. Let me know if I'm missing anything!

--The convicted influence-peddler Congressman Bob Ney has confessed to taking a bribe from convicted influence-buying lobbyist Jack Abramoff, in exchange for helping obtain awards for his Native American clients from then-HUD Secretary Mel Martinez in 2003.

To the surprise of nobody, Darrell Crate will not seek another term as chairman of the Massachusetts GOP when his term ends in January. Crate deserves credit for the fiscal solvency of the party, no mean feat given the meager return it offers for the prospective contributor's dollar.

Crate's four-year tenure will be remembered as the time when the Republican Party went from near-irrelevance to total irrelevance in the state, and he is not blameless in that.

When I first wrote about ActBlue, the Cambridge-based web
site connecting progressive contributors to candidates, it had processed about
$250,000 of donations to 125 campaigns. (See "Two
Schmoes," September 2004) Yet I wrote that it "may not be
crazy" to think that ActBlue could, as its founders envisioned, move $15 to $20 million in the 2006
election cycle.

I take Russ Feingold at his word, that his decision to forego a 2008 Presidential campaign was based on the greater good he can now do in the Democratic-controlled US Senate. Being a majority-party US Senator is a pretty good gig.

Will other senators think likewise? Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Christopher Dodd, Joe Biden, and Evan Bayh have all made sure their names are in the '08 picture.

[Note to readers from Adam Reilly: this entry you all love so much was actually written by David Bernstein.]

The right-wing phrase of the week is "San Francisco values," as in the kind that Speaker-in waiting Nancy Pelosi will try to impose on America. Bill O'Reilly used the phrase repeatedly on the air; Newt Gingrich used it in a fundraising mailer; congressional candidates featured it in TV ads and mailers; and, in at least one case, a newspaper editorial used it in endorsing a Georgia Republican.